Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood [Paperback]

A canvas of vividly impressionistic splashes of growing up young, gifted, Black, and female.
The Philadelphia Inquirer

In this memoir of perceptions and ideas, renowned feminist intellectual bell hooks presents a stirringly intimate account of growing up in the South. Stitching together the gossamer threads of her girlhood memories, hooks shows us one strong-spirited childs journey toward becoming a writer.

Along the way, hooks sheds light on the vulnerability of children, the special unfurling of female creativity, and the imbalance of a society that confers marriages joys upon men and its silences on women. In a world where daughters and daddies are strangers under the same roof, and crying children are often given something to cry about, hooks uncovers the solace to be found in solitude, the comfort to be had in the good company of books.

Bone Blackallows us to bear witness to the awakening of a legendary authors awareness that writing is her most vital breath.

bell hooks(1952-2021), born Gloria Jean Watkins in 1952, was an American author who used lowercase as both an homage to her maternal great-grandmother and an attempt to keep readers focus where it belonged: on her work. When she died in 2021, hooks left behind a lifetime of thought that was decades ahead of its time. In the heyday of feminism, when the movement claimed to represent all women equally, hooks revealed inAint I a Womanwritten when she was only nineteenhow the specific life experiences of Black women were being marginalized.

She never lost this pioneering spirit, bringing it to bear on more than thirty books of literary criticism, childrens fiction, poetry, and autobiography, includingKilling Rage: Ending Racism, Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood, Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life, Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, Where We Stand: Class Matters, ColsX